My name is Jane Freeland (nee Woodcock), I was a patient at the Marguerite Hepton Orthopaedic Hospital at Thorpe Arch, in Yorkshire, UK, from 1944-1948 with spinal TB. I'd like to share memories with other patients, nurses and others linked with the hospital. Do you have a story to share? If so, please contribute.
Jane Freeland (nee Woodcock)

Monday, 8 June 2009

Judith at "School"

My memories of the two ward sisters, Sister Gough and Sister Lodge (now Mrs Ibbotson!), and the succession of nurses, are that they were largely kind and caring. But the person I really adored at MHH was our teacher, Mrs Cooper. She taught us English and Sums and got us to keep our News Books. I only kept these in term time - there are gaps for the school holidays.

Mrs Cooper was always bringing us nature and weather reports and updates on what she‘d seen in her garden. She made us a tin & string telephone, painted scenes on the windows at Christmas and when new boy Leroy arrived, whose family came from Jamaica, Mrs Cooper taught us where Jamaica was and how Columbus had bumped into the West Indies while looking for India.

If I didn’t have my diaries to jog my memory, the only other children I’d remember would be: Coralie (best friend for quite a while, but no idea what her surname was), Steven Woods (he lived near us in Armley), and Joshua (his mum used to pass a comic or sweets to my mum at weekend visiting to give to Joshua every Monday with the hushed words “Our Joss Monday”. This became a catchphrase - “ArJossMundy”.) Of all the patients and staff I remember though, I can’t actually visualize any of them – they’re all impressions rather than faces.

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